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Summary articles LE1. Leadership, followership, and evolution. Some lessons from the past
Van Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008
Leadership = a universal feature of human societies and affects the quality of life of citizens in
important ways.
Leader-follower structures emerge quickly.
Humans easily recognize leadership potential in others and often attribute great importance to leaders
even when it’s not warranted
Leadership literature lacks an integrative theoretical framework. Three reasons:
- Literature contains many useful mid-level theories that are not very well connected
- Literature focuses on leaders and tends to ignore the essential role of followers
- Research largely concentrates on proximity issues of leadership (why is one a better leader?)
and rarely considers ultimate functions (how did leadership promote survival?)
- Little cross-fertilization between psychology and other dynamics
An evolutionary analysis of leadership
Leadership:
a) Influencing individuals to contribute to group goals
b) Coordinating the pursuit of those goals
c) Building a team and guiding it to victory
Group performance!
Selfish-gene: makes it not obvious why some voluntarily subordinate themselves (become followers)
Tinbergen’s four functions model
1) Proximate functions of a mechanism: what kind of people make good leaders?
2) Ontogenesis: when do leader-follower patterns emerge in the life span?
3) Phylogenesis: when did leadership emerge in our species, and are there parallels in other
species?
4) Ultimate (evolutionary) functions of a mechanism: did leadership promote survival of our fore
bearers so that it became a part of our evolved psychology?
Human evolution, group life and leadership
Collective action (foraging): but where to hunt? Could be solved by decision-making process involving
one leader.
Group survival would have depended on cooperative effort and group cohesion (inversely related to
group size)
Intergroup competition may have created pressures for the evolution of a range of groupish traits
(altruism, morality, social identity, leadership)
Leadership may have existed a long time ago, solving problems like group movement, intragroup
conflict, individual fitness, and intergroup competition.
Adaptations supporting leadership and followership
Follow the leader:
, 1. Individuals must perceive the need for coordination
2. Situations in which threats are not obvious or are novel require mechanisms that allow people
to plan ahead and anticipate new dangers, suggests a role for general intelligence
3. Individuals must decide on a collective course of action and differing opinions offer a
prominent role for leadership
4. Once a course of action is identified, it is important to initiate group action (facilitated by
individual differences such as assertiveness vs. patience, self-control)
5. The problem of maintaining cohesion in large, dispersed groups could be solved by
specialized mechanisms for communication, perspective taking and conflict management
(theory of mind, empathy, social identity, language)
Game theory analysis of leadership
Framing leadership in terms of game theory:
1) Suggests the way leadership and followership may have evolved
2) Requires researchers to consider the perspectives of leaders and followers simultaneously
(clarifying costs and benefits for each)
3) Suggests how individuals whose interests potentially conflict might work together to maximize
mutual benefits
Evolutionary game theory:
- Views social interaction as a process in which strategies compete in a Darwinian fashion
- Agents embody strategies that are encoded in genes and tested against alternative strategies
and copies of themselves (over the course of evolution)
- Genes spread through a population depending on the relative superiority of their associated
strategies in evolutionarily relevant situations
- By regarding leadership and followership as alternative game strategies, we may be able to
tell how well these strategies fare in competition with each other as well as with alternative
strategies
The leader game
Used to model the leader-follower coordination problem (which player takes the lead?)
- Playing game simultaneously = both take on the leader role
- Playing game sequentially = one takes leader role, other one follows (coordinates) vb. being
the first born in the family or tallest in class might make people adopt leader roles later in life
- These models suggest that populations contain individuals with genotypes predisposing them
to either leadership or followership.
The riddle of following
Payoffs of leaders are much better than from followers. Followership would be a rational choice if the
costs of competing for leadership outweigh the benefits.
Groups with an effective leader-follower structure have higher aggregate fitness (= better for
everyone!). Leadership might create enough variation between groups for natural selection to
operate. Followers are still better off than in poorly led groups.
A natural history of leadership
, 1. Prehuman leadership: swimming patterns of schools of fish, migrating birds, waggle dance of
honeybees.
a. Decision rule: follow the one who moves first
b. Choice to initiate and choice to follow (peace keeping)
2. Band and tribal leadership: three stages:
a. From the emergence of humans until the last ice age: hunter-gatherer bands & clans of 50-
150 people.
i. Environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
ii. No formalized leader role, power = leader (restricted to domains).
iii. Dominance hierarchies
b. Democratic leadership style of early humans (fairness, integrity, competence, good
judgment etc)
c. Homo sapiens: 200.000 years ago; increased cognitive capacities supports theory of mind,
language and culture
3. Chiefs, kings and warlords: agriculture enabled groups to settle; populations grew
exponentially. Communities grew, so did the potential for within- end between-groups conflict.
More formalized authority structures (chiefdoms & kingdoms) warlords & soldier classes with
much aggression. Warlords use their power to dominate resources and advance their personal
interests (in conflict with our evolved leadership psychology)
4. State and business leadership: to the beginning of the industrial revolution (250 years ago).
Communities merged into states & nations + larger companies. Citizens get more freedom (to
move away from their leader): shifts balance of power away from leader. Workers went from
slaves to more free men.
a. Large organizations perform better when organized in units roughly the size of hunter-
gatherer groups
Implications of an evolutionary analysis for leadership theory and practice
Understanding followership
o Followership emerged through specific ancestral problems that were best solved through
collective effort coordinated by a leader-follower structure.
o People are more inclined to follow under conditions of threat
o Followers prefer different leaders depending on the problems they face
o Leadership may be unnecessary/resented when people face relatively simple or routine
coordination problems
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